New standard makes life harder to set up a free range farm

Yesterday Ministers for Consumer Affairs approved a standard which allows farms with outdoor stocking densities of 10,000 hens per hectare to be classified as free range. This just perpetuates the con which big business has practised on consumers for years. If they had made the announcement today, it would have been regarded as an April Fools Day joke !! One serious aspect of this decision is that no council will allow free range egg farms to be established if they follow the Ministers' edict. Any farm with such a density will be regarded as intensive so they it will be treated as a feed lot - not an 'as of right' use even when t he land is zoned for farming.